by Chris Chase, USA TODAY Sports

by Chris Chase, USA TODAY Sports

Before college basketball's biggest weekend gets underway, we take a deeper look at the teams still alive for the national championship and present four facts you didn't know about the Final Four schools.

Louisville

1. High-five pioneers? Louisville's claim that its 1978-79 team invented the high five sounds like George Costanza saying he coined the term "pardon my French." However, the story about the Doctors of Dunk creating the celebration at a practice has some validity, even if the true origins of the popular move will always remain murky.

2. Disco never dies. Ninety percent of the disco balls manufactured in the United States are made in Louisville. This raises two questions. First, who's producing the other 10%? Second, is Rick Pitino's white suit actually an homage to John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever?

3. Coaching stability. Louisville has had just two coaches since 1971: Denny Crum and Rick Pitino. It sounds remarkable, until you notice that it's not the longest tenured duo at the Final Four. Syracuse has made only one coaching change since 1968. That was when Jim Boeheim took over from Roy Danforth way back in 1976. No other team in major college basketball can match either streak.

4. It's "looavull." But no matter how you pronounce it, someone from Louisville will insist you're saying it incorrectly.

2. Carrier Dome-ination. More than 75 teams have played multiple games against Syracuse at the Carrier Dome. Only one of those teams -- Massachusetts -- has a winning record there.

3. Orange you glad no one else picked that color? In 1890, Syracuse students wanted to come up with more festive school colors than the university's pink and blue. After some meetings, the school went with solid orange because no other college had that monochromatic color scheme.

4. Heroin inspiration? Velvet Underground frontman Lou Reed wrote many of the band's early hits while an undergrad at Syracuse. In 2010, Spin asked Reed about developing his songwriting process. "That happened when I was in college and starting to write the stuff that ended up on the first Velvet Underground record," he said. "I don't remember if it was the first song I wrote, but Heroin was the first one where I remember saying, 'I'll leave that one alone.'"

Wichita State

1. Non-state state school. Wichita State is the first "State" school without an actual state in its name to make the Final Four since Memphis State in 1985.

2. The shocker origin. Want to know what a Shocker is but don't want to Google it at work? WSU's name comes from 1904, when the school played a football game and the team manager chose to promote the team with the moniker. It refers to the off-season harvest (also called "shocking") of nearby Kansas wheat fields. Interestingly, an anagram of "Wichita State" is "wheat is tacit," though maybe I was being too liberal with the use of "interestingly."

3. Final Four return. This is Wichita State's second Final Four appearance. The first came in 1965. That gives the school the same number of appearances as Maryland, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Stanford and Virginia and one more than Notre Dame, Pittsburgh and Wake Forest, among others.

4. Alum-no. Other than some famous names from the sports world (Bill Parcells, Xavier McDaniel, Joe Carter), the famous alumni list from Wichita State is a veritable who's who of people you'd actually have to ask "who?" about. The most famous attendees are probably the guys who founded Pizza Hut and the BTK serial killer.

Michigan

1. Darth Vader went here. On the other end of the famous alum spectrum, Michigan boasts former presidents, cabinet appointees, astronauts, Google co-founders, Super Bowl MVPs and famous racial and religious pioneers as former students. Yet the school's website chooses to lead its alumni page with the sentence "James Earl Jones has a U-M degree." This is awesome (said like JEJ's famed CNN tagline).

2. The war heroes. The film Saving Private Ryan was based on members of coach John Beilein's family. His mother, Josephine Niland, had two cousins killed on D-Day and another who was shot down weeks before and presumed dead. The military sent her fourth cousin, Fritz, back home in order to spare the Niland family the grief of losing four sons in battle. Josephine's brother, Tommy, was also on the shores of Normandy that day. He survived and later became an athletic director at Le Moyne College. In 1983, he hired his nephew, John Beilein, to become head coach.

3. Bo Shembechler's pep talk. After coach Bill Frieder took a job at Arizona State before the 1989 NCAA tournament, the famous football coach and athletic director told Frieder not to bother showing up for the postseason. ''I don't want someone from Arizona State coaching the Michigan team,'' Schembechler famously said. ''A Michigan man is going to coach Michigan.'' Days later, Schembechler gave a similar speech to the players on the basketball team, telling them that they were Michigan men who would fight the Michigan way. Star Glen Rice credits the pep talk with helping the team regain focus. Three weeks later, the Wolverines were national champions.

4. Chris Webber walked. It's usually overlooked, but the timeout wasn't the most egregious error Webber made on that fateful play in the 1993 national championship.